In his latest film, Looper, he plays a killer who learns that he must bump himself off at a later date. He talks fate, fortune and the need for mystery
There can't be a lot of people who have lain in bed at the Trump hotel in Toronto and watched The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieslowski's 10-hour take on the biblical edicts. And not just because the hotel has only lately opened. Fewer still can have done so before breakfast. Probably, just two: Paul Dano and his girlfriend.
"Zoe was not happy. She was like: why did you make me watch this? I said, well, we sort of chose it together. She didn't know it was going to be so sad. I cried a little bit too."
Dano is taking a break from communist Warsaw to brunch at Trump's 31st-floor restaurant. The white walls swirl with 12ft flowers, their petals plaster, their eyes diamante. Big mirrors reflect black glitter fittings. A waiter produces, unbidden, a mini leather luggage rack for my bag. It sits between us, like a slumping baby. Dano orders a black coffee and the wagyu beef hot dog with braised short rib, caramelised onions, sauerkraut, pepperoncini and pommery mustard. "It's like a sausage, right?" The waiter confirms. "Cool. I eat sausage for breakfast."
The man who had his milkshake drunk in the best scene of the best film of the century so far, There Will Be Blood, is now 28 and still hungry. Between acting jobs and visiting Zoe (Kazan, an actor and writer, who is shooting in the city), he has been fuelling up on nutritious art. "Bingeing on Kieslowski. Watching his movies and reading about him, that's fun." He's been writing a little ("I'm sort of pecking away at something"), playing guitar (he had a band, Mook), and not inhabiting someone else's head.
"When I'm not acting I like to go home and be really normal. So I usually grow out my hair until I get the next part. I brought nicer clothes because I'm with my girlfriend at a film festival but usually I'm pretty grubby. Not super-grubby but I should probably change my pants more than I do." He delicately folds the cuffs on his brown cardie.
The fruits of Dano's previous labours are about to fall from the trees. First up: Looper, which opened Toronto, a screwy sci-fi from Rian Johnson, in which he plays an assassin in 2044 Kansas who goes awol after learning he must bump off his future self. Dano – snivelling, dim – is not the star; that's Joseph Gordon-Levitt, donning false nose and weird chin as the younger version of Bruce Willis. He does take the lead in Ruby Sparks, a whimsical fantasy about a once-precocious novelist now scuppered by writer's block. To overcome it, he daydreams a character, Ruby, who then comes to life, and thinks she's his girlfriend. In extra-metafictional style, that film was scripted by Kazan in the flat they share in Brooklyn; she also stars as Ruby.
What links the two is an interest in self-determination. In Ruby Sparks, he plays God, literally dictating the actions of someone else; in Looper he has signed up to a career that means his end-date is mapped out ahead of him. Does fate appeal?
"Well, I do like the idea of consequence and how our actions play themselves out, but I am completely scared of knowing what the future would be like. I would never go near a fortune teller, even though it's probably not even real. I just don't wanna know. I like mystery and I like discovery."
Dano speaks tentatively, with considered precision, in a mix of slang and scholarship. He is studied but also, when at ease, sweet and relaxed. "I don't wanna come off like some super-douchey intellectual." He would like to be more open-minded. Kneejerk is not for him. "It's really easy to judge quickly. I like to be somebody who will give everybody a chance. If you already know what a film is then that's boring to me. You don't want to spend months of your life on it. There needs to be some unknowable aspect.
"At Toronto you see how quickly reviews go online and I do wonder to myself: is that totally fair? If you go see the Terrence Malick, should you be sleeping on it for one night? Those people put years into a film and I sort of wonder if it's healthy to comment right afterwards. It's totally terrifying to me. Last fall I was reading Machiavelli's The Prince. One of the biggest themes is adapting to change. I was thinking: God, how am I going to do that, because my instinct, especially in film, is the opposite. It's feeling we need to go backwards, not forwards."
Yet Dano has long been progressive. His first big role, aged 17, was opposite Brian Cox in the brilliant, slippery paedophile drama L.I.E.. In the film, he was the victim – a culpable cherub. Three years later, the parts had turned insidious: a predatory hippy in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, a weasely Christian rocker in The King (both 2005). These two roles fed into the performance of his career: creep preacher Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood (2007). Paul Thomas Anderson cast him on the advice of Daniel Day-Lewis, who was impressed by his work on Jack and Rose – a good call, for with just four days' preparation, Dano made for a magnetic adversary. The year before, he was a mute aspirant pilot in Little Miss Sunshine (whose directors he helped to recruit for Ruby Sparks). Since then, he has worked with Ang Lee (Taking Woodstock) and Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff), alongside Tom Cruise (Knight and Day) and with Jon Favreau (Cowboys and Aliens), balancing bit parts in blockbusters with meaty leads in indie flicks such as Gigantic and For Ellen. Next up is Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave. This is a career defined by laser-beam choices.
Dano's own relationship with his past is stickier, however. While Looper toys with the idea of recognising yourself 30 years previously, Dano can clock in at any point with himself half his life back. "I was in Deauville last week and they played clips of some films I'd been in and I was completely overwhelmed in a way I did not anticipate. I just thought: shit I have to get through these clips, just putting one hand up in front of my face." For professional reasons? "Less so. More to do with memories and how certain things change." What has stayed the same? "It's hard to say. Hopefully I'm more mature and a better person now. Not that I was a bad person. Hopefully I'm making progress of some kind."
His singular physicality amplifies all this. Yet that face, which can look weedy on screen and result in him getting typecast as the whelp, is wide and sculptured up close. What's amazing is how quickly it tapers. It's as if someone brought home an Easter Island statue, then took a chisel to the chin.
To don prosthetics, like his Looper co-star, holds great appeal, he says. "That would be super-fun, I think. But I would never do anything like that to myself otherwise." Does he never get that urge to punch himself in the face, just for a change? "Yeah, sure. Probably not for a change but for some self-destructive, masochistic rage."
In fact, Dano is a man of remarkable self-possession. While the parts he plays are forever freaking out, he has his fingers firmly on the wheel. We trade aeroplane metaphors for a while (he dislikes flying in them, as he doesn't understand the engineering). "I would rather be flying the plane than not flying it. In general, I think I try to fly it more than not. With acting certainly I have to fly it. I feel like I have to be responsible for what I'm participating in or putting out into the world." But isn't he only flying it in so far as Ruby Sparks is flying it – reading from someone else's script, responsible to them for their creation? "But that's part of your leap of faith. So as long as the intent has some good qualities to it you can get through, whether the film works or not, or makes money or critically does well. That original intent is very important to me because then I can't get too upset. If the plane goes down I'd rather it be my fault than somebody else's."
It is time to get the bill. The hot dog has gone, only the ketchup remains. We're both foggy on what wagyu actually means. An all-milk diet? That the cow has been stroked? "It was good, but no, I don't think I would upgrade if I were paying. I'd be happy with a New York street hot dog. Lord knows that wouldn't have been stroked. But I'll pretty much eat any kind of meat." He smiles and we walk to the lift. Pit-stop complete, it is once more unto the breach. Communist Warsaw calls.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/20/paul-dano-like-idea-consequence
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